n. (abbr. NACO)a program through which participants contribute or edit authority records for personal, corporate, and jurisdictional names, uniform titles, and series to the Library of Congress Name Authority FileMichelson 1987, 198While archivists might argue about the high costs of implementing authority control, they cannot ignore the greater costs associated with excessive search or failed retrieval. Archival participation in the Library of Congress’s Name Authority Cooperative (NACO) offers a beginning.Byrum 2004, 237The Name Authority Cooperative (NACO), founded in 1976, now encompasses some 395 institutions that have collectively developed and maintained a database of more than 2,000,000 authority records in addition to the more than 3,500,000 records created by Library of Congress staff.Anderson and Allen 2009, 393, fn. 48While contributing these names to official registries such as the Name Authority Cooperative Program of the Library of Congress (NACO) would be ideal, we think that a flat folksonomic implementation will be more useful and accessible to a larger group of moderately interested people and more likely to effectively capture the local nuance.LoC 2021aThrough this program, participants contribute authority records for agents, places, works, and expressions to the LC/NACO Authority File. Membership in NACO is open to individual institutions willing to support their staff through a process of training, review, and direct contributions of records to the LC/NACO Name Authority File.
